Komorebi Pavilion: Collaborative Self-Production through Digital Fabrication

2016 – 2017

Authors:

Mark Mulligan, Ignacio Cardona, Jun Sato, Teaching Staff; Carly Gertler, Anne Schneider, Paul Mok, Danielle Kasner, Meric Ozgen, Gary Lin, Cari Alcombright, Chao Gu, Students

Institutions:

Harvard Graduate School of Design; University of Tokyo; Autodesk BUILD Space

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Komorebi Pavilion explores self-production in a radically different context from the community-based processes of my earlier work. Developed collaboratively by faculty, students, engineers, and fabricators, the project investigates how digital design and fabrication can establish a shared set of rules through which multiple participants collectively construct an architectural system.

Computational analysis defined the structural behavior and connections of water-cut PETG components, while their final assembly remained open to interpretation by different builders. Rather than prescribing a fixed form, the system enabled the pavilion to emerge through collaborative construction. Komorebi thus reframes self-production as a relationship between digital protocols and distributed human agency, exploring how designed rules can enable collective authorship rather than determine a singular architectural outcome.